Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
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The commercial side has made huge progress, too. Look up "diamond making machine" on Alibaba. You can buy a high-pressure, high temperature six sided press for about US$200,000. A chemical vapor deposition machine is about the same price.
De Beers, the diamond cartel, has an R&D operation, Element Six. They sell synthetic diamonds for lasers and other exotic applications. The technology is good enough to achieve flaw levels in the parts per billion range, and to make diamond windows for lasers 10cm across.[1] This is way above jewelry grade.
Over on the natural diamond side, there's been a breakthrough. The industry used to break up some large diamonds during rock crushing. Now there's a industrial X-ray system which is used to examine rocks before crushing to find diamonds. It's working quite well. A 2500 carat diamond was found recently.[1][2] TOMRA, which makes high-volume sorters for everything from recyclables to rice, has a sorter for this job. This is working so well that there's now something of a glut of giant diamonds too big for jewelry.
The finishing processes of cutting and polishing have been automated. The machinery for that comes mostly from China and India.
Diamonds are now something you can buy by the kilo, in plastic bags.
[1] https://e6-prd-cdn-01.azureedge.net/mediacontainer/medialibr...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/amandakooser/2024/08/23/monster...
[3] https://ikcabstracts.com/index.php/ikc/article/download/4101...
Another story is the scratch-resistance. For that it would be sufficient to coat the surface of the lens with a thin layer of diamond. Which is done in several applications.
And, honestly, that would be really really cool.
Yeah, there are other materials with better refractive indices and that are tougher and cheaper and dont shatter. Sure.
But if we can get diamonds down to something that could be made into lenses for the (very high end) retail market, man, that would just be so cool!
Diamond layers within ICs to help get the heat out are being considered for future GPUs.[2] Again, it's not a magic bullet.
[1] https://www.diamond-materials.com/en/products/thermal-manage...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266638642...
They have the advantage of keeping a sharp edge for a much longer time than steel blades, but they cannot be sharpened again with simple tools and for some purposes it may be inconvenient that the zirconia blades cannot be made as thin as the best steel blades, due to the risk of breakage, and there are also less choices of blade forms, e.g. there are no bird's beak zirconia blades, which is the best shape for peeling and paring vegetables.
High-quality zirconia kitchen knives, like those made by Kyocera, are very pleasant to work with. Diamond blades could not feel much different, even if they should remain sharp for a longer time, but with a higher risk of breakage when mishandled.
Which shatters on contact with a small bone.
The only thing that beats it is single crystal boron arsenide which has some obvious downsides, being of course much more expensive and involving arsenic, which is considered a bad thing.
And with that, diamond is destined to be even cheaper than silicon, I think. Much more available and easier to purify, the hard part is rendering it into a crystal which is relatively solved.
It's worth noting that the Chinese word for diamond is literally "drill stone", which highlights its application as an abrasive more than jewelry.
> Diamonds are now something you can buy by the kilo, in plastic bags.
I can’t wait to use diamond cookware. A pan with a thin layer of 430 stainless steel for induction, a wafer of diamond, and then another thin layer of stainless on top will be amazing. Almost perfect evenness over any cooktop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_properties_of_diamond...
I had no idea it was that good. I wonder why they don't make them that way then, as expensive cookware already seems to be a high margin business.
The mismatched coefficient of thermal expansion could also be a problem.
That said, if they can figure out vapor depositing diamond onto stainless steel, I'd take a diamond surface over an enamel surface. Provided they can figure out how to make it perfectly flat rather than so jagged at the molecular level that literally everything sticks to it.
("wouldn't that burn? It's just carbon after all": only if you give it the cast iron pan treatment and manage to have it sit on so much gas for so long that you get it up to 700C, which would make no sense)
Steel for induction and strength. Diamond (like copper cores) for heat traversal.
The same way rolls royce no longer sells luxury cars to stuffy British aristocracy but makes a mint building huge jet engines.
RR cars has been a BMW subsidiary for 21 years, having been separated out from the aircraft engine manufacturing business in the 1970s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Motor_Cars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings
(unless that's exactly what you meant of course, Rolls Royce Holdings indeed no longer makes the cars... )
Tiffany's isn't suddenly going to be cheaper.
DeBeers are just positioning on price, natural more traditional and romantic, etc.
Who wants to know their engagement ring was half price?
I mean...a ton of people. My fiancee and I just purchased her ring together and it was pretty much a silent agreement from both sides that lab grown was the way to go (confirmed out loud of course). The stone we ended up getting was about 1/10 the cost the closest natural we could find, and both of us agreed that there are way better ways to spend that money with everything else in the future.
Many people also love jewelry but would rather not have something worth a brand new car on their hand.
sounds like may be soon we'll see diamond wafers for the chips (especially as the price of processed wafer from a fab increases, the cost of the source wafer itself is becoming less important) Add to that X-ray lithography, and the Moore's Law will continue for quite a while.
Sadly GaN suffers from horrible p-channels (they use resistor/nmos logic as the non-differential logic family for GaN ICs), and SiC from kinda sorta delaminating gate oxide (JFETs are fine though, and vertical ones are very nicely behaved, including a lot of resilience like avalanche resistance (though actual (non-capacitive) current flow through the gate junction has to be limited to prevent damage)).
N-type diamond is just difficult, along with diamond itself at a purity approximating "intrinsic"/"none" levels of doping. The issue is that you have to continually etch graphitic carbon during the CVD process, requiring aggressive chemistry.
I'm no materials-scientist, but I did some napkin-math on that once and it came out to some ridiculously-thin-sounding layer of diamond.
One of the hibernation screens for one of my ebook readers reads "Don't Panic", for all the obvious reasons. (Different franchise, similar concept.)
Atomic fabber = chip fabs making things on ~10 atom scales
3D printing homes is possible now, just a bit niche
Wouldn’t a diamond skillet be incredibly non-stick, easy to clean, and totally non toxic?
With the current focus on PFOS and just amount of garbage materiel used to prepare our foods, I think some innovation is just around the corner.
It's already here! Stainless steel for pots, carbon steel for pans.
Once I got my first carbon steel pan (not cast iron) I knew it was game over for the teflon pans in my house. I'm now gradually replacing the teflon pans with carbon steel, and then I'll never have to replace another pan in my lifetime.
The upcoming PFAS ban in Europe will probably accelerate this transition greatly, unless DuPont et al have too much influence over politicians...
Time to commoditize crowns.
Today, given cutthroat competition and "race to the bottom" pricing strategies, lab diamonds are ubiquitous, extremely high quality, and cheap. Less than $200/ct and sometimes much less: https://detail.1688.com/offer/751071300271.html
Moissanites are now less than $5/carat at retail: https://detail.1688.com/offer/586468555080.html
These are legit. I've bought some.
Within 10 years of today, I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Moissanites have already become as near-worthless as synthetic rubies. This is going to open up new industrial uses for those gemstones.
I have to bring this up because a lot of people are talking as if this is the entirety of the reason for their decrease. But there's diamond files, diamond cutting blades/wheels/drills, you can make glass from it (really only used in labs that absolutely need them because the price), and many more uses. Many of these don't care about size, quality, or clarity. So instead of pulling from scrap material from jewelry making or rejected diamonds you could just make your own and ensure your own supply.
One of the things I've loved about synthetic diamond prices coming down is just how cheap and available diamond cutting wheels and filing tools have become. You can now get a set of diamond files on Amazon for under $10. That's crazy
Link? I'm skeptical. It seems more likely someone is abusing the term "diamond", no?
A wide range of very ordinary cutting tools are now tipped with big chunks of polycrystalline diamond - cutting tools for machining aluminium, inserts for rock drills, saw blades for cutting fibre cement boards. Even woodworkers are starting to use diamond saw blades and router bits, because the improved wear life over tungsten carbide gives a rapid return on investment.
https://www.amazon.com/Yakamoz-10-Piece-Diamond-Jewelers-Pre...
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/140mm-160mm-180mm-Dia...
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32719545477.html
Considering that these are a niche product requiring a precisely shaped diamond insert made by a relatively small operation in the US, I think it's believable that a Chinese company could produce diamond files for ~$10, considering that it only needs diamond powder and has more space for mass production.
The carat-cost curve is not linear, so it seems plausible. As carats go down, there is a huge supply of diamonds, especially those without beauty attributes (color, cut) which can be used for non-jewelry purposes.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B092D4CV56
are also sold in U.S. hardware stores
https://www.harborfreight.com/needle-file-set-10-piece-69876...
https://www.menards.com/main/tools/hand-tools/files/tool-sho...
They are very cheaply made, but as far as I can tell are actually diamond. They're good for shaping glass and ceramics. For metal, you're better off using hardened steel files, but these ones will work, just slowly and with less precision.
My mother and grandmother had sapphire engagement rings.
https://theeyeofjewelry.com/de-beers/de-beers-jewelry/de-bee...
Correction is healthy and benefits mankind long term, there was nothing good coming from ie impact on Africa. Nobody cared about that, so things are fixed from another direction.
They had immense value in ancient world. They were valued much more than gold - due to their rarity. Southern India was the only known source for mining diamonds in ancient world [1]. They were used as currency and was valued higher than gold. In fact there were wars fought for diamonds.
There is a saying about Koh-i-Noor, one of the most famous Diamond - "If a strong man were to throw four stones – one north, one south, one east, one west, and a fifth stone up into the air – and if the space between them were to be filled with gold, all would not equal the value of the Koh-i-Noor" [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golconda_diamonds
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/16/koh-i-...
All the gold available to humans on earth right now fits into a ~20m cube, and that is most certainly worth orders of magnitude more than a single diamond in a historical artifact.
> Who does not love diamonds? Where is there a mind in
> which the bare mention of them does not excite a
> pleasant emotion? Is there any one of rank too exalted
> to care for such baubles? The highest potentates of the
> earth esteem them as their choicest treasures, and
> kingdoms have been at war for their possession
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Diamonds/ENwOAAAAYAAJ?h...
This is why the Romans, e.g. Pliny the Elder, used for diamonds the name "Indian adamant". The name "adamant" without the "Indian" specifier had already been used for many hundreds of years (the oldest attestation is in Hesiod), but it had not been applied to a gem, but to nuggets of native osmium-iridium alloy, which can be found mixed with the nuggets of native gold in the alluvial deposits of gold (and which, unlike the gold with which they were mixed, could be neither melted nor forged, hence their name, "untameable"; "unconquerable", which is used in the article is a bad translation for "adamant").
Pliny the Elder described the "Indian adamant" as consisting of octahedral crystals, which is the most frequent form of the natural diamonds. It appears that at that time it was impossible to cut the diamonds, at most they might have been polished a little, so the crystals used in jewelry retained their native shape.
By the time of Pliny the Elder, the "Indian adamant" was the most expensive gem, surpassing even the noble opals, the pearls, the emeralds and the beryls, which were the next most expensive gems at that time. The Romans did not care much for transparent crystals, they appreciated much more the higher quality exemplars of noble opals or pearls, if those exhibited a nice play of colors.
The Crown Jewels disagree with you
https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/history-and-stories/t...
As they say, "If you want to know a diamond's worth, try selling one"
So for the iron alloys, which are the material most frequently processed by machining, diamond is not suitable. Other hard crystals, like alumina a.k.a. corundum, are much better for this purpose, even if they are less hard than diamond.
Artificial diamonds, you mean. The natural ones will keep their price, just as "hand-crafted" goods did (and, I suspect, as "human-produced" content in the future will); it's a matter of status and signalling that you can afford to buy an inferior, more expensive product.
In 2012, when I was shopping for an engagement ring, a natural 2ct diamond cost $250,000. (I bought a 2ct moissanite for much, much less, and my wife is very happy with it.)
When I looked in fall 2023, a natural 2ct diamond cost $20,000. That's a loss of over 90% of value, not counting inflation! (Now the supply of diamonds is much higher, and the demand for natural diamonds is much lower.)
I suspect that natural diamonds will be sold for a 40-300% premium over manufactured. I also wonder if impurities will become fashionable, just to show that a specific diamond is actually natural and can't be made in a lab.
> Artificial diamonds
BTW, there is no such thing as an artificial diamond. A manufactured diamond is 100% diamond, for all intents and purposes.
https://www.pricescope.com/diamond-prices/diamond-prices-cha...
What do you believe the distinction between artificial and manufactured is? As far as I'm aware, they're almost synonyms.
Dictionaries literally list "man made" as one of the definitions of artificial.
Why can’t you add impurities when manufacturing a diamond? “Doping”
I hope that happens for purely aesthetic reasons too: natural "imperfections" add a lot of visual variety and interest that's otherwise missing in a lot of diamond jewellery—at least the sort that I've seen.
Diamonds made by man or nature are now indistinguishable, except to highly trained experts (and even then, not always), so it's unclear why anyone would prefer the expensive kind.
Ummmm no.
As a lover of clockwork, I couldn't give a toss what anyone else thinks of my clock or watch collection.
I think this is a bit of a strong prediction. It's already been interesting to watch the rhetoric switch from "Natural ones are stronger and more pure" to "Manufactured diamonds don't have the flaws that give character". Which itself is fairly short-sighted, we can already manufacture things like star-sapphires with specific impurities in them.
So in the end all that will be left is "this one is natural". It will be a 'veblen' type signal for some people... but maybe it'll start to be a signal of gullibility, and also of recklessness or callousness, because diamond mining has both environmental and human costs.
You want people to prefer artificial diamonds because they're cheaper, so it becomes less financially viable to sell natural diamonds, so the people involved in that immoral stuff you're mentioning go out of business
But they haven't.
Plus, the signal value is lost once the natural and manufactured versions become indistinguishable.
Synthetic diamonds, you mean.
There is noting artificial about them! They are diamonds.
"But this is a purely philosophical difference then!" Yes, it is. Humans still take such silly differences into an account, consider e.g. replicas of artwork made by the original artist themself. Are they genuine? Debatable!
And for jewelry too. I bought my wife a 2ct moissanite in 2012. There was no way we could have done that ring with a real diamond back then.
When I was shopping, I happened to see a girl at a conference who had many large moissanites on her ring. It was gorgeous, and well within the price range of upper-middle-class.
When I say new industrial uses, I'm thinking of things that haven't been done before and hinge on large bulk volumes of material: Windows, very large diamond anvil cells, high-performance heatsinks, and stuff like that. Lots of cool things are going to be developed.
I've noticed that synthetic sapphires are (or were?) much more expensive than synthetic rubies. Do you know why?
A ruby is corundum with chromium coloring it; a sapphire is corundum with (most typically) iron coloring it.
Iron isn't rare, so either it affects the process used to make rubies, or there's no real reason for the price gap.
Do they make olive sized ones (1-2 cm diameter)? How much would such one cost?
Mind you most people won’t be able to tell a difference unless you put the $5 cut next to a $500 cut.
Had he done it on his own, he would have been extremely wealthy, being the supplier of synthetic diamonds to the world (assuming he wouldn't have faced legal challenges by former employer). He would have also been able to pursue this full time, who knows how much he could have improved the tech.
Just because the powers that be don't think its a good idea, doesn't mean it isn't (it also doesn't mean it is). And if they don't want you building it, for goodness sakes, don't just give them your amazing idea, build it so you can profit when it turns out to be a golden nugget.
And yes, funnily it seems that the purer a diamond is (clear, few impurities etc) the higher its price/carat, until it is so pure that it means it is a lab grown diamond and not a natural one and the price drops
So it's less like gold which is fungible and a more natural form of money.
Diamonds feel more like an NFT...
The diamond cartel did a great job equating "real", mined diamonds with love and romance. For some couples, unfortunately, lab-grown just doesn't have the same feel to it.
Lab-made was a no brainer, I got a flawless and huge stone for the price I would have paid for a crappy 1ct from DeBeers. My only regret is that whatever I paid for the diamond will still be way over-market in a few years but well, had to get married at some point. I guess I'll get her a golf-ball-sized diamond for our 10th anniversary.
It's the same symbolism for why it's popular for guys' wedding rings to be made out of super strong, super hard metals.
People give DaBeers too much credit for what was an extremely natural extension to the engagement ring. Advertising only gets your foot in the door, it does have to be a reasonably good idea for it to take on a life of its own.
You will find quite a few cultures with bride prices and dowries that turn this on its head.
But I have to say I'm an outlier anyway, I've never been married and I prefer polyamorous relationships. And I've never had real money to speak of. So I'm not really the right type.
I do know the families with a big house and fancy dinner parties with Sunday silverware. But I tend to stay away from those settings :) I don't fit in and I don't even own a suit or dress shirt that fits.
So yeah I probably just don't 'get it' :)
If debeer didn't exist, something else would exist in its place, because the root of this is not debeer. The root is female nature.
It's better this way to artificially jack up the price of diamonds. Because then you can find people who are selling the diamond at an undercut price and satisfy the female instinct. Is the diamond mined? How would she know?
Otherwise if debeers didn't do this, women may influence the culture to latch onto some other form of tribute that can't be made artificially. Gold let's say.
Just kidding, I doubt this has anything to do with nationality. I'm sure you guys have plenty of women that don't expect a cartoonish diamonds-and-gucci tribute from prospective partners.
It has a much better shine, is cheaper, and (anecdotally, in my circles), is just as cool.
Unless she wants a "real diamond", in which case lab-grown is no good either.
Why wouldn't I be? Human creations can be every bit as awe-inspiring as anything found in nature.
No waterfall is as impressive as a smartphone, if you know what you're looking at and what it took to make it happen.
But none of them filled me with awe the way that the Hoover Dam did.
What story is there behind a rock in the ground outside of a middle-school tier earth science lecture?
Profound hubris in an otherwise interesting article.
Once we get to asteroid mining, we'll be able to get gold cheaply enough to not care about it. On Earth, most of the gold sank into the planet's core because it dissolves well in molten iron. So the gold that we're mining comes mostly from meteorites.
It is very much a bag holder problem.
In some countries, people (often families) have saved for a long time to accumulate some inventory of something that is now worth a lot less. The diamond industry varies a bit by country, but in places where individual dealers hold a lot of inventory, there is a lot of incentive to be against synthetics.
I saw this firsthand in Turkey. I gave my a fiancée a ring with a very nice moissanite stone about a year and a half ago. She showed it to some jewelers and most had to really make a show of things like, "Congratulations on your upcoming wedding, but I can only work with real stones. We are not supposed to even look at these."
And I don't blame them for at least having to act this way. A lot of these family stores have hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars worth of natural diamond inventory that they took years to accumulate, and along comes something that is superior in every way for a fraction of the price.
Yes. In some other places around the world, the resistance to lab grown stuff has been violent. But the industry of natural diamonds is much more violent, and it is great to see that the way we mine diamonds will soon be a thing of the past.
Prices are dropping like a rock from a high tower, and colors and other options are becoming more available. Within 10 years you'll be able to buy virtually any diamond you like, in any common color, for less than a 2ct stone would have cost in 2014.
Also, if you really like huge gems, you can buy a moissanite today at 1000ct. Even on Amazon.com there are examples at 100ct. https://www.amazon.com/Gemonite-15CT-100CT-Moissanite-Colorl...
This would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Things in the diamond and gemstone business are changing fast.
*Spoiler Alerts*
Marathon Man (don't watch if you're squeamish about dental practices) with Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Man_(film)
Also the 2021 Irish/Belgium TV series, Hidden Assets, involves diamonds.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
When I shopped for an engagement ring in 2012, there was a clear cohort of women who significantly valued a diamond from the ground. Fortunately, my (now) wife and I saw through the marketing gimmick, and laughed all the way to the bank.
> I'm genuinely curious why you bought a diamond
You do know that engagement rings don't have to be diamond, right? Mark Zuckerburg bought his wife a $25,000 ruby ring: https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/pic-mark-zuck...
I bought Moissanite. It was a reasonable price, the ring is gorgeous, my wife loves it, and it helps with family / cultural pressure around diamonds.
(It also leads to interesting situations with people who don't understand Moissanite. My wife used to get a lot of "what does your husband dooo???" questions before people understood the changes in the jewelry market.)
e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo... (spoiler: it's harder to do than you'd think, and you won't get anything near what you pay -- and that in the 80s, before synthetic diamonds pushed the market down further)
Yes, and even better, don't design the ring by yourself. Get a nice jewelry box for the diamond, use it for the proposal, and when you open the box, say:
"Our relationship is something we're going to build together. I want your opinion on everything for the rest of my life, because you're going to be my partner. I got the diamond, but let's design the ring together, you and I, because this is too important for me to do by myself. I need your help."
They'll melt, and the ring will mean even more.
Usually people want to be able to put the ring on their finger (for pictures and engagement announcements) as soon as the question is popped.
Also, the "I need your help" line falls a bit flat to me. Reads like the proposer isn't capable of completing a very important task without some handholding from the "proposee".
You're supposed to know what kind of ring your soon-to-be fiancé wants ahead of time.
And they're going to want to be able to put it on their finger right away.
Also theres not much to a high quality ring and not much for you to spend money on there.
You could also consider using a temporary ‘semi-set mount’ for the proposal. Then afterwards you could go to a jeweller and have them create the perfect ring to your specifications.
Now, 6 or 7 years my wife has a big birthday coming up and I’m considering a diamond pendant - when I bought the diamond for the engagement ring there was far fewer options but now there’s lots of places online. LooseGrownDiamond seems very competitive but if you find anywhere better priced I’d be interested!
I hear many jewelers are not big fans of this. It's like a customer who bought their own steak to a restaurant and asks the chefs to cook it at a discount. It's not like the jewelers don't know where to buy cheap stones online. Some jewelers are just happy to get the business, but expect others to sneer a bit.
However, "retail" jewelry stores often price things using what they call Keystone (2x markup) or even triple keystone (3x). So, a $500 piece would sell for $1000-$1500.
Now gold is worth 2.5x what platinum is worth.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2541/platinum-prices-vs-gold-pri...
Some women would honestly prefer a 0.5-1.0ct natural vs a 2.5ct synthetic.
In any case, the ring is for her, so I'd recommend making sure she's on board with what you're thinking.
Rolex doesn't put synthetic diamonds on watches. Cartier doesn't put synthetic diamonds on bracelets. Tiffany's won't put synthetic diamonds on rings.
If you think that natural diamonds are trending towards no longer being a luxury item, then don't buy them at all (why purchase a synthetic one if you think the diamond market is just a marketing ruse anyways?)
I've never met someone that bought a synthetic diamond that didn't immediately try to justify it. I think that says a lot.
"This diamond caused untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire, and that makes it rare and valuable." It's just a weird flex at this point. It marks you out as someone who doesn't care about the wellbeing of others.
But every time someone gets excited about natural diamonds they try to justify that synthetic ones just aren't the same. I think that also says a lot.
as someone else said, "Veblen goods"
Dude, the copper in your phone required untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire.
You want to profess some grand moral judgement about purchasing mined minerals, but I guarantee all of that moral judgment goes out the door when it comes to products that you can afford and want to buy.
Whataboutism isn't a useful or helpful way to discuss an industry with unbelievable human suffering.
Start a post about copper mining if you want to discuss copper mining. We're talking diamonds here, which have a demonstrable human cost.
What you likely to consider "trying to justify it" is more likely "trying to let someone know they are delusional."
"My synthetic diamond is functionally identical, if not even better than your mined one" is factually true and not a justification...
Except they're not functionally identical. Natural diamonds function in society as a luxury item. Synthetic diamonds have always functioned as a utility item (used in chainsaw blades, for example). Synthetic diamonds certainly do not function as a luxury item and they're not marketed to people with money.
Look, I have no problem with synthetic diamonds in the same way that I have no problem with reprints of Salvador Dali paintings. But, the market for original Salvador Dali paintings is very different than the market for reprints even though they might appear "functionally identical."
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c05ako/...
Pot, Kettle and all that. With probably a large helping of selection bias.
https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/
https://web.archive.org/web/20151031203903/https://www.wired...
What a beautiful site.
The subtle pink background, the choice of font, the minimal appearance (true to the spirit of being minimal, not just dead-ass simple), the way images are woven through, the footnotes, ...
Excellent execution!
I know a jeweler personally that sells synthetic and natural diamonds. He can spot the difference from a mile away between a synthetic and a natural diamond (synthetics look extremely pure and have no flaws). His wealthy clients buy natural diamonds. Not because it's a "better investment" but because they can.
If you can buy a knockoff Louis Vuitton for 5% of the cost of the real one, great, go for it! Most people won't be able to tell the difference (I certainly can't). But the market for authentic Louis Vuitton isn't going anywhere, and the people that can afford it will buy the real ones, and the people that can't will buy the fake ones.
As long as there's a distinction between natural and synthetic, synthetic diamonds will drop to a dollar a carat while naturals only become more of a status symbol.
EDIT: changed real to natural when referring to diamonds
Calling one "real" and not the other is the wrong. Synthetic diamonds aren't an imitation. The distinction is "natural" and "synthetic".
> Not because it's a "better investment" but because they can.
From my experience it's to show off (that's the whole point of jewelry) and they'll be happy to tell you about their real diamond anytime the conversations ventures to anywhere near anything remotely related. I'd imagine the only people impressed are other suckers who happen to be poorer.
Regardless, I view natural diamonds as having "real" value in the luxury space and synthetics as... Not.
If case 2 happens, it just means that diamonds get replaced with something else like gold, and gold luxury items become much more expensive. In any case, your future wife probably doesn't really want that massive synthetic diamond. It's a human thing, whether we (the HN crowd) think it's ridiculous or not.
I remember looking at engagement rings about 5 years ago, my now wife is quite environmentally conscious. At the time it was like ~£1200 for a diamond one and £800 for a synthetic one.
Assuming you mean "late 2018" by "about 5 years ago" (because that's where the graph has a 1.5:1 ratio), that $1200/$800 diamond was probably about 0.2 carat (obviously depends on the other Cs), and would likely be around $1200/$300 today.
Ended up with moissanite, which was significantly cheaper than diamond, but still not, like, cheap if you care about it looking as diamond-like as possible, though I probably could have done as well with diamond buying “used” if I’d had the patience for it and more knowledge to be more confident I wasn’t getting scammed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/82feb/8202diamond1.h...
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Boy-Creation-Diamonds-Tracy/d...
> Because it’s so difficult to distinguish between mined and lab diamonds (even for jewelers), diamond grading institutions inscribe LG or Laboratory-Grown on the rim of lab-grown diamonds, visible at 20-times magnification.
They have a pretty interesting business model: they're mostly online, but also offer in-person appointments with a designer and offer to 3D print pieces in resin before producing them.
What does graft mean in this context? Is there a process where you graft diamonds, like plants? Does it refer to the diamond seed crystals mentioned in the article?
Most people want the nicest thing they can afford in the moment, whatever that is.
stigma is independent of any of those very reasonable metrics unfortunately
You need to pay someone to go dig stuff up apparently for love to be true love
In fact, incredibly high. Five times higher than copper.
A lot of unfounded hubris there. Come back when you have perfected a man-made forest with all its diversity of plants and animals.
They've been cheaper for a while but it doesn't matter that it's cheaper to make lab-grown diamonds than it is to mine natural diamonds if the consumer is going to pay the same regardless.
gemsny.com friendlydiamonds.com lightboxjewelry.com
I found a wide variety of 2-3ct diamonds for $1200-1400 there (round, brillant cut, the "classic" type), which is what a 0.75-1.0ct used to cost
Similar things can be said about lavish weddings couples can't afford and go into debt for. It's a culture of spectacle and pretense. If you're not a rich aristocrat, don't pretend to be one. You're not "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
In any case, what I really object to is your assertion that women "demand" it and men "acquiesce" to their demands. In most cases people just figure its the tradition and its fun and frankly, if I were a woman, I wouldn't say no to a costly sign of commitment if the dude wanted to do it. But most of the women I know have no deep commitment to the practice.
Diamonds are such a racket! Forever!
It’s amazing how much science and technology has progressed due to adversarial competitive pressure.
With Putin running Russia to the ground, that pressure is much lower.
Would US have ever gone to space if there wasn’t a race, or got into nuclear if the Nazis weren’t doing it?